It’s probably the ALA-Accredited Librarian in me, but I’ve wanted to make Gallery Server Pro function more like a Document Management System for a long time. The new Sueetie Media Gallery Expanded View does just that. Many of the backend DMS essentials are already built into Gallery Server Pro. What the new Sueetie Media Gallery Expanded View does is add bibliographic properties to media objects and displays albums like descriptive content folders rather than as simple thumbnails.

Media Gallery as Document Management System

Gallery Server Pro powers Sueetie Media Galleries and it’s a fantastic application. For navigation Gallery Server Pro displays albums and media objects as thumbnail images. To use the Media Gallery more like a document management system, Sueetie adds the option of the Expanded Media Gallery View where navigation is more analogous to folders and documents, with each album and media object supporting true bibliographic properties.

Let’s look at the default Gallery Server Pro thumbnail format followed by the new Sueetie Expanded View.

Folders (or "albums" in GSP) presented as thumbnails are great when you want to display a lot of albums in a smaller amount of space, but not so great if you’re viewing the items as folders and want more detail about what’s inside. To make that happen and use the Media Gallery more like a Document Management System, here is the new Sueetie Media Expanded View!

I should add in regards to using the Media Gallery like a Document Management System, searching is an important function. Currently the Media Object Titles and Descriptions are searchable with Sueetie’s global Lucene-based search engine. Since these bibliographic properties are part of the Sueetie Framework’s SueetieMediaObject they can be added to the search engine with little effort.

Here’s a screenshot of the new detailed display format of the Sueetie Lollipop Blocked Theme folder. Instead of the default thumbnail format where both the screenshot is indiscernible and the title is truncated, a full screenshot title is displayed along with html-enabled item description.

Editing Expanded View Content Details

Two new menu items were added to the Gallery Server Pro Action Menu, Edit Sueetie Album Details and Edit Sueetie Media Object Details.

Sueetie Album and Media Object details are edited inline, working the same way as Gallery Server Pro’s "Edit Captions" function. Here’s what that looks like.

There are no plans at the moment to add support for managing all bibliographic data (series, conference, publisher, etc) for Sueetie 1.4, as their use is more a custom requirement. If or when bibliographic data editing is available, it will most likely be in the form of an edit form in Sueetie Administration and not in Gallery Server Pro.

Configuring Sueetie Media Gallery Expanded View

Three new media settings have been added to the Sueetie.config file (located in /util/config) to configure Media Gallery Expanded View. The first is the DisplayListFormat boolean property. If true, the Expanded View is enabled, otherwise the default thumbnail view is used. The ThumbnailWidth and ThumbnailHeight properties are needed to set the dimensions of the non-image thumbnails for your Expanded View display.

A new .ASCX control has been added to Gallery Server Pro, the SueetieListView.ascx control. This can be modified to display content and content details however you like.

The logic of displaying the Expanded View SueetieListView.ascx control is that the Gallery Server Pro Album Display page (/gs/pages/album.ascx) checks the Sueetie Framework’s SueetieConfiguration.Media.DisplayListFormat property on PageLoad(), and if true loads SueetieListView.ascx. Otherwise the default ThumbnailView.ascx control loads.

Modifying Media Object Display at the Folder Level

With Atomo you can extend the logic of Sueetie Expanded View by specifying the display of Media Content by Folder Type, that is, load a different .ASCX control based on whether the Media Album is a Sueetie Video Album type, Audio Album type, Document Album type, and so on. Here’s how you would do that using the SueetieContentType enumerator with the SueetieMediaAlbum.

A long time developer, I was an early adopter of Linux in the mid-90's for a few years until I entered corporate environments and worked with Microsoft technologies like ASP, then .NET. In 2008 I released Sueetie, an Online Community Platform built in .NET. In late 2012 I returned to my Linux roots and locked in on Java development. Much of my work is available on GitHub.